The Gospel in Stars and Sand
On a quiet night in the ancient Near East, an old man stood beneath a sky filled with stars he could never count and staked everything on a promise he could not see.
On a quiet night in the ancient Near East, an old man stood beneath a sky filled with stars he could never count and staked everything on a promise he could not see. The silence broke with God’s voice: “Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them… so shall your offspring be” (Gen. 15:5).
Abraham could not number them. Who could? Yet beneath the stars, he relied on God's promise that he and his barren wife would have a family so abundant, it would bless all others. Scripture records it simply: “And he believed the LORD, and He counted it to him as righteousness” (Gen. 15:6).
That was the gospel Abraham heard.
Not a three-step formula.
Not an altar call or a fiery warning to avoid hell.
It was the announcement of God’s intention to bless the nations through his family, and the invitation to believe that promise.
The Gospel of Personal Salvation
The message that first brought me to faith sounded very different:
Admit you are a sinner. Believe in Jesus. Commit your life to serving him.
I am deeply grateful for that message. It pointed me to Jesus and started me on the path of following him. But it is not the same gospel Abraham believed.
Throughout the New Testament, Abraham is held up as the model of faith. Again and again, the apostles return to him as the benchmark of righteousness. Abraham was counted righteous not because of who he was or what he did, but because of his belief.
Which raises the question: What, precisely, did Abraham believe?
The Gospel Preached in Advance
It was not belief in Jesus as we know him. Abraham did not pray to Jesus, worship him, or believe in his future sacrifice. Yet God counted him righteous.
Why? Because Abraham trusted the promise God proclaimed to him: that through his family, all the nations of the earth would be blessed. He believed God would do what he said.
Paul later reflects on this moment in Galatians:
“The Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, ‘In you shall all the nations be blessed’” (Gal. 3:8).
Paul is unmistakably clear: Abraham heard the gospel.
That same gospel runs like a thread through Israel’s story—reiterated at Sinai, expanded in David’s kingdom, and carried forward as hope through the many exiles the Jewish people have endured. Jesus himself tied Abraham’s faith to his own mission:
“Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it and was glad” (John 8:56).
Abraham never saw Jesus of Nazareth. Yet he rejoiced in the day—the era when God’s promises would reach fulfillment. He trusted the one who spoke, without knowing every detail of how the promise would unfold. That lack of detail did not diminish his joy.
Abraham’s faith rested in the confidence that God’s word could not fail.
When the Gospel Gets Too Small
The standard Evangelical gospel of salvation is sincere and well-intentioned. It has transformed countless lives, including my own.
But it reduces the story of God to begin and end with the individual. In this telling, Jesus appears almost out of thin air, detached from Israel’s identity, offering a faith centered primarily on personal improvement—Jesus as a motivating best friend, God as a life-coach, Scripture as a self-help book.
Severed from Abraham’s promise, Jesus is reduced to past accomplishments, as though dying for sin and improving our lives is the total sum of his mission.
That gospel collapses under the weight of Scripture’s story.
If our gospel no longer begins with the God of Abraham—the God who bound himself by covenant to people, land, and the restoration of all things—then we are falling for a different gospel and placing our faith a God Abraham never knew.
God alone cut the covenant with Abraham, passing between the pieces of flesh severed beneath the oaks of Mamre, in the shadow of Jerusalem—God’s holy hill. From that moment forward, the future of the world was tethered to a promise God alone swore to keep. And when Jesus arrived announcing the closeness of that promise, he taught of a specific kingdom—a kingdom anchored fully in Israel’s covenant story and eschatological hope. He commanded this good news be proclaimed from Jerusalem, to Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.
Any message that ignores that kingdom’s covenantal center has drifted from the gospel Jesus preached and misrepresents the God it claims to reveal.
Through Abraham’s seed, on Abraham’s land, Abraham’s blessing would heal the world. Even Ishmael and Esau stood within the horizon of that mercy—brothers invited to reconciliation, blessed by the promises sworn to their fathers.
Justified by Trust in God’s Promises
No one is declared righteous by bloodline, legal status, or even vague belief in Jesus. What does it mean to “believe in Jesus as your personal savior”? Savior of what? Salvation to what? Evidenced by what? This is why Paul grounds justification in faith like Abraham’s.
The apostles’ taught that like Abraham, we are counted righteous not by who we are, but by trusting in God’s promises. We believe God will do what he said. Today these promises are still unfolding, moving toward ultimate fulfillment in the reign of Messiah, Abraham’s seed, through whom the nations will be blessed. And we cannot believe these things if we do not first know them.
Jesus is not the conclusion of these promises. He is their guarantee.
His resurrection stands as living proof that God’s word to Abraham cannot fail. Faith in that is the faith Scripture calls righteousness.
Recovering the Full Gospel
A gospel centered on God’s enduring oath to Abraham substantiates our faith. It declares—without apology—that God will keep his covenant and that the promised descendant will lead Abraham’s family into faithfulness.
That message carries a sharpness disciples of Jesus desperately need as we divide truth from error in a world struggling to locate its hope.
The standard gospel, though familiar and winsome, collapses under the weight of Abraham’s story. It leaves large portions of Scripture unopened and has little use for the oath God sealed by blood beneath the stars of Canaan.
Worst of all, it teaches us to believe salvation is about us—that Jesus exists primarily to meet our needs and carry us to heaven when we die.
But the gospel is not about us.
God’s promise was not given to me. It was given to Abraham. Real faith trusts that God intends to keep all his promises—to Abraham, to Israel, and to the nations. Not vaguely. Not merely “spiritually.” Not in some distant world foreign to the prophets and apostles. But here—through the people God chose, in the land he named, led by the Messiah he promised, who will raise his people to immortality and lead the restoration of all things.
If this is not the message we are proclaiming to our friends and neighbors, we must recalibrate toward Abraham’s hope. Otherwise, we find ourselves bearing false witness to the Most High God and having so quickly deserted the truth for a different gospel.
Under the Starry Sky
Beneath the stars, with nothing to his name and no proof to go on, Abraham believed—not only in Messiah’s birth, death, or resurrection, but in the day when God would do what he said.
We live on the other side of the cross, with more clarity than Abraham could have imagined. Yet God’s work in the world is still unfinished. We wait, aching for the peace envisioned by the prophets.
Different gospels will not survive these darkening days.
The world we inhabit—and our participation in the blessings still to come—requires more. It demands the kind of faith that stakes everything on a future yet unseen.
Our hope is in the day Abraham’s starry sky is split open, when the great Cloud-Rider comes bringing every promise with him.
Like Abraham, we number the stars and sift the sand. We order our lives around the certainty that God will keep his word.
That promise is very good news.